


circles all the way down.

by foundCarcosa



Category: Interstellar (2014), True Detective
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-19
Updated: 2015-08-19
Packaged: 2018-04-15 12:25:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4606662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, a lawman lost a daughter. Once upon a time, a pilot raised a daughter. Once upon a time, Carcosa and Gargantua are one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	circles all the way down.

**Author's Note:**

> “Love is the one thing that we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.” - Dr Amelia Brand

When Murphy was three years old, Donald bought her a tricycle. “Three years, three wheels,” he explained, winking, and Joseph laughed.

“It’ll be four wheels before long, just you watch,” he countered, waving Murph on as she all but flew into the front yard with the trike. Tom objected – “not before me, Dad!” – and Donald shook his head, and Joseph absentmindedly popped open a brew as he gazed at the ochre sky above the fields.

Murphy was having a time getting traction on the windblown path, and on either side of her, the corn nodded its amusement. Joseph squinted at the sky some more as he drank, his head tilting.

“You see that?” he mused, pointing the neck of the bottle at the clouds, but Donald had gone back inside. “Looks like… I don’t know. _Strange.”_

 _Like a whirlpool or some kinda portal,_ he might have added with a little laugh, but a gnarled hand of potent fear had curled around his heart and drawn up tight. He sucked in air and looked for Murphy – no sign of her. The corn nodded its amusement. The sky curdled.

“Murph!” he called, his voice unpleasantly reedy. “Come out where Daddy can see you, hon!”

He waited.  
He called again.  
He went down into the cornfield.

Murphy, who had been investigating a fascinating bug that was hellbent on eluding her grubby child’s hands, burst into tears when she saw him tearing through the field -– wild-eyed, hyperventilating, _haunted._ “I’m sorry,” he whispered hoarsely as he scooped her up, trembling, “I’m sorry, baby, I’m sorry. I was scared, baby. Thought they’d take you away from me again.”

He’d start to tell Donald later, in the soft of the night, _I heard a voice, in the cornfield, said some shit about Murph. Weird shit, man. Kinda messed me up._ But there wasn’t enough beer in the world for that conversation.

\------

Sometimes Joseph would wake up in the middle of the night -– no cold sweats, no half-remembered nightmare, just… a black, bleak wakefulness. In the darkness, he’d feel the room was smaller than it was –- small, and bare, and spartan. And so was he –- small, and blank, and austere.

And then he’d remember the children, and push himself out of the bed, and the room would snap back to its proportions and he’d feel the comforting thud of his heart behind his rib cage, and he’d remember he was alive.

Tom slept like a rock, the sleep of the young and content. His room held no secrets for Joseph.  
But in Murphy’s, he felt as if he walked on shifting sands. The library that formed her far wall loomed, heavy with its knowledge; his fingers drifted over spines with weighty names like Tolkien and L’Engle; Dante and Descartes; Schopenhauer and Chambers. Murphy would be a student of more than just the world around them, more than just the encroaching blight and the punishing sands. Murphy would travel, and travel far.

Like he once had, and will again.

“Song of my soul, my voice is dead,” Murph murmured as she turned over, “…unsung, as tears… _nn…”_

Feeling the floor buck and roll under him, and his mind lurch in kind, Joseph hurried from the room.

\------

The first book in Murphy’s library to succumb to the strange force of will that Murph would soon identify as _a message, Morse code, gravity,_ was _The Drawing of the Three._ Stephen King. He hadn’t read it in years, could barely remember it, but it gave him a nasty dissociative jolt when he picked it up.

The second book to fall was _The King in Yellow._

\------

Joseph gave Romilly his nature sounds, because he had left Earth behind long ago.

He tried to remember the farm –- the nodding corn, the open sky, the children’s feet heavy on the floorboards, the adrenalin rush of outrunning the blighted dust storms –- but it slipped through his fingers as easy and light as the sand he’d found in patterns on Murphy’s floor. When he dreamed –- _when_ he dreamed –- all he saw was circles. Spirals, and whirlpools, and rings within rings, and clouds swirling around the peak of some tall forbidding tower.

“Circles all the way down,” he murmured, unaware that he’d spoken out loud until TARS replied, “It’s always circles.”

“What did you say?” Joseph asked, startled.

“It’s always circles. Or, let me guess -– you humans haven’t figured that out yet.”

Joseph narrowed his eyes, but his lips were already twisting into a smirk. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, slick. I could still make use of a semi-sentient vacuum cleaner on this tin can…”

\------

It was quiet in the center of the universe.

And despite his education, Joseph couldn’t shake the feeling that he _had_ reached the center of everything that was, everything that is, everything that will be. The dissociative feeling he always had –- on Earth, with Murph; at NASA, when the senior Dr Brand spoke of the war of hope and hopelessness in the human spirit; in space, as the universe drew him closer and closer to Gargantua –- was gone.

“Because there I am,” he said, his voice light with dizziness and wonder, “and here I am. And there I will be.”

He couldn’t touch the Cooper-That-Was –- the austere, gaunt lawman who stared into the swirling void and heard Murphy ( _Sofia,_ he called her) speak soothing words to him. But for Cooper-That-Is, Murphy still existed, very real and very alive, and when Joseph reached out to her ( _dit-dit-dit._ don’t follow me into that good night. _dash._ rage, rage, against the dying of our light. _dit-dash._ it was you all along, pulling me through time. now– _dash-dit-dash-dash_ –now stay, stay, and follow my dying light) she listened. She didn’t understand, not at first –- but she _would._

“It is over,” he said, feeling the tears but not feeling them, as he tapped against the watch hand with infinite patience, “no more circles. We did it, she and I. We’re done, now.”

 _And so it begins again,_ says the Singularity in its infinite amusement – the void and the light, stationary and constant, pulling us through time.


End file.
